The drawing board

“Where should a red line should be drawn?” Benjamin Netanyahu asked Tuesday, suiting his action to his words during his annual speech to the UN General Assembly.

“A red line should be drawn right here,” the Israeli Prime Minister went on, whipping out a thick red marker to ink in a line toward the top of a cartoon-like bomb, with a crudely drawn fuse attached.

This is not the first time Mr. Netanyahu has used a prop to get his point across at the UN.

In 2009, he produced Holocaust-era documents, including the blueprints of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Bir-kenau.
This was in rebuttal to a previous speaker, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had asserted the Holocaust was a figment of the Jewish imagination.

During the same speech, Mr. Netanyahu brandished the Nazis’ report of the infamous 1942 Wannsee conference in the suburbs of Berlin at which the Final Solution was drawn up.

“[A]fter a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments,” he said.

In March, during his speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Washington, the Israeli leader waved an exchange of letters from the World Jewish Congress to the U.S. War Department during the Holocaust to prove a point that ultimately Israel needed to rely on itself, according to the Jerusalem Post.

National Post news services

Harper and Netanyahu met this morning in New York after both issued public condemnations of Iran on Thursday.

Netanyahu told the United Nations that Iran will be able to make a nuclear bomb by next summer.

And Harper suggested Iran poses a clear and present danger as he accepted an international statesman award from a New York-based group Thursday night.

He raised the issue again at the meeting this morning, saying Canada will continue to work with its allies to alert the world about the danger presented by the Iranian regime.

Netanyahu drew his “red line” for Iran’s nuclear program on Thursday despite a U.S. refusal to set an ultimatum, saying Tehran will be on the brink of a nuclear weapon in less than a year.

By citing a time frame in an address to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu — who has clashed with President Barack Obama over the urgency of military action against Iran — appeared to suggest no Israeli attack was imminent before the November 6 U.S. presidential election.

Holding up a cartoon-like drawing of a bomb with a fuse, Netanyahu literally drew a red line just below a label reading “final stage” to a bomb, in which Iran was 90% along the path of having sufficient weapons-grade material.

“At stake is the future of the world,” Netanyahu said. “Nothing could imperil our future more than an Iran armed with nuclear weapons.”

Experts put that at the point that Iran has amassed enough uranium, purified to a level of 20%, that could quickly be enriched further and be used to produce an atomic bomb.

Netanyahu told the United Nations he believes that faced with a clear red line, Iran will back down in a crisis that has sent jitters across the region and in financial markets.

Shunning an opportunity to speak at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, Harper delivered his attack on Iran after receiving the World Statesman Award from the New York-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation.

He targeted Iran as a country that constitutes “unambiguously a clear and present danger” to the world both for its pursuit of nuclear weapons, its support of terrorism and its threat to the existence of Israel.